The Tragedy of King Richard II by William Shakespeare, first published in a quarto edition in 1597, is the first in a sequence of four historical plays known as the Second Tetrology, which deal with the early phases of a power struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York. The Richard II of the play has been characterized as both mercurial and complacent; however, several sustained soliloquies in the play demonstrate how deeply realized his character is. During one of these soliloquies, which takes place after his imprisonment and before his assassination, he seems to regain the qualities of pride, confidence and courage that he lost when he was dethroned - and so goes towards the died with a more powerful spirit than ever before. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay The scene (5.5), begins in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle, where Richard is being held prisoner, and begins on a dejected note as he tries to reconcile his life in prison with the life he led as king: I have studied how I can compare this prison where I live to the world; And, because the world is populated, And here there is no creature other than myself, I cannot do it. However, I will get there. (5.5.1-5) Despite his discouragement, Richard begins to explore how he might live his life in the microcosm of the dungeon, while still retaining some semblance of his old life. He finds his life in the dungeon missing because it is deserted. However, the last line indicates a reversal in this attitude. He begins to struggle against the internal forces that threaten to drag him into despair and loneliness when he declares, in the fifth line, that he will "hammer him." Because a king needs a family and subjects, he seems to have decided to populate the people. his private world, as we will discover in the next few lines: My brain I will prove the female to my soul, My soul the father; and yet these two generate A generation of thoughts still in the process of reproducing; And these same thoughts populate this little world, In moods similar to those of the people of this world, For no thought is happy.... (5.5.6-11) Aside from the obvious metaphorical qualities of this sentence , that it creates a world in itself, symbolic relationships seem to exist between certain words. He names his “soul” the “father,” as if to express God’s relationship with the soul (i.e., God is the father of the soul). And he places his brain as the female of his soul, implying that the brain nourishes and cares for the soul, which was begotten by God. These two concepts are then linked together, as the mother (perhaps symbolic of Mother Earth) and the father (symbolic of God) produce a generation of thoughts "still reproducing" - as in the world outside the Richard's prison, where God and Earth produced people who constantly reproduce. In this way, Richard creates within himself the same relationship that exists in the natural world. It is probably significant that Richard speaks of the thoughts and people as not being satisfied, because in a historical context, the people of England had been in revolt since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (McKay et al., 452). McKay, Hill, and Butler argue that the Peasants' Revolt was probably the greatest uprising of the Middle Ages and that "decades of aristocratic violence, much of it perpetrated against the weak peasantry, had bred hostility and bitterness" (453 ). They add that Richard II later met with the leaders of the revolt, agreed to charters securing their freedom, deceived them with false promises, then crushed theuprising. The next twenty lines of the soliloquy focus on the thoughts that have been developing in Richard's mind: and slowly transmogrify them into the feelings of comfort that they represent for Richard. It begins with the character of thoughts: The best kinds, like thoughts of divine things, are mixed with scruples and oppose the word itself to the word: Thus, "Come, my little one", and then again: "It is as hard to come as a camel To thread the postern through the eye of a needle. (5.5.11-17) He then addresses their depiction as real people, painting metaphors of them – and them in a situation similar to his own. It won't be the last either; like beggars who, sitting in the vines, shelter their shame, which many have, and others must sit there. And in this thought they find a kind of ease, bearing their own misfortunes on the backs of those who have already endured such misfortunes. (5.5.25-30) With these descriptions of his thoughts - as akin to the thoughts of others who suffered the same fate as Richard - he finds comfort in realizing that he is not the only one who has been imprisoned, having suffered these thoughts of despair. And by comparing himself to a "simple-minded beggar", he again seems to realize that he has indeed been lowered to the level of a mortal, as he did earlier when speaking to his wife in the first scene of the same act: “. ..think of our former state as a happy dream/from which the truth of what we are awoke” (5.1.18-19). From these lines (5.5.25-30) until line 41, Richard wonders if he is a It is better to be king than a beggar. He finally makes a decision about his peace of mind and connects it to his own mortality, when he decides that no man will find peace until he is satisfied with who he is, even if he is he has nothing: “Neither me, nor any other man. the man who is only man, / Will be satisfied with nothing until he is relieved / From being nothing...” (5.5.39-41). Note that, in the first line of these three, Richard lowers himself from God's representative on Earth to "but [a] man." Because this is a historical play, time plays an important role - history could not happen without time, and time has difficulty existing without creating history. So, in this sense, the two terms have an almost synonymous meaning. And Richard's imprisonment is the physical manifestation of time at its worst, where it can actually cause suffering. It is important to note that Richard is imprisoned in three ways: in his mind, in the natural world, and in time, but it is equally important to note that time is the imprisoned man's main enemy - a fact that Richard seems to understand well. When he hears music playing, the rhythm of the music causes him to think about time and its passage. He speaks of time as if it were an enemy, or a precious resource that he misused and mistreated, and which has returned for revenge: I wasted time, and now time wastes me; For now time has made me numb. clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they throw their watches before my eyes, the outer watch, towards which my finger, like the tip of a dial, always points, to purify them from tears. (5.5.49-54) Here he not only laments his waste of time, but he speaks of time in both its inner and outer aspects. He marks time within himself through his thoughts, while outside of him the minutes mark their path through tears of regret. “[M]inutes, times and hours” (5.5.58), for Richard, have now become “...sighs, tears and groans” (5.5.57). But even if he shouts to the music and its rhythm "... Let it no longer sound" (5.5.61), he nevertheless gives his., 1969. 554-667.